Welcome to our book's website. We hope you enjoy reading
"Embedded Computing" as much as we have enjoyed writing it. The title of
the book contains two major keywords: Embedded and VLIW (Very
Long Instruction Word). Historically, the embedded computing community has
rarely been related to the VLIW community. Technology is removing this separation:
high-performance techniques such as VLIW that seemed too expensive for embedded
designs have become feasible and popular. This change is bringing in a new
age of embedded computing design, in which a high-performance processor
is central. Increasingly, the traditional elements of nonprogrammable components,
peripherals, interconnects and buses must be seen in a computing-centric
light. Embedded computing designers must design systems that unify these
elements with high-performance processor architectures, microarchitectures
and compilers, and with the compilation tools, debuggers and simulators
needed for application development. Since this book is about embedded computing,
we define and explore that world in general, but with the strongest emphasis
on the processing aspects. Then, within this new world of embedded, we show
how the VLIW design philosophy matches the goals and constraints well. We
do this in a way that clearly and systematically explains the unique problems
in the embedded domain, but that also is approachable to those with a general
background in architecture and compilation. Conversely, we also explain
the VLIW approach and its implications and point out the ways in which VLIW,
as contrasted with other high-performance architectural techniques, is uniquely
suited to the embedded world.

The VEX Toolset (for Linux-x86) can be downloaded from this
HP Labs VEX download site.
Please make sure you read the
License Terms
before downloading and using the toolset. VEX ("VLIW Example") is a compilation-simulation system that targets
a wide class of embedded VLIW processor architectures, and enables compiling,
simulating, analyzing and evaluating C programs for them.